Counting The Super-Rich And Single-Family Offices

I am regularly asked about the size of the private wealth market, especially the number of people or families with hundreds of millions of dollars. Along the same lines, I am asked about the number of single-family offices.

A number of consulting organizations calculate the size of the private wealth market. Consulting firms, such as the Boston Consulting Group and Capgemini, regularly produce reports on the industry including their calculations of the number of wealthy individuals. Wealth-X is another firm that produces such information.

When it comes to calculating the size of the private wealth universe, these consulting firms and other ones employ well reasoned – albeit different well reasoned – methodologies to produce their numbers. The conundrums are not with the methodologies but the assumptions that underpin the methodologies and the resources they can deploy to ferret out the super-rich and determine the number of single-family offices. The result is usually highly erudite estimates and well-researched lists. But they are certainly estimates, and the various lists can differ substantially.

Consider the number of billionaires. Depending on whose numbers you are looking at, somewhere between 1,700 and 2,100 billionaires live in the world today. None of these estimates likely included Sergei Roldugin. Who is Sergei Roldugin? In 2014, he informed the New York Times that he did not have millions of dollars. Then the Panama Papers came along, and Sergei (or at least his name) is connected to US$2 billion located in an interlaced network of offshore companies. What the Panama Papers has done is name some names that are not counted by the firms tracking the super-rich.

As for single-family offices, industry pundits provide estimates ranging from 2,000 to 15,000. Without question, a plethora of single-family offices intentionally hide from view. Moreover, I am very confident there are more than 2,000 single-family offices as I have a database of slightly more than 2,000 single-family offices, and I am absolutely certain there are more single-family offices than I have in my database. Moreover, if you use a liberal definition of a single-family office, you will probably end up with more than 15,000 of them.

In all likelihood, there are more rich people – especially when it comes to the super-rich and single-family offices – than are calculated by the consulting firms. Single-family offices, the super-rich, and even the rich have been known to hire wealth managers, lawyers, and accountants to obfuscate and often hide their wealth making the process of counting them increasingly difficult. Nevertheless, the strong consensus is that the world of the single-family office and the super-rich is growing in number and the amount of wealth they control.